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heavy metal band Mama’s Boys, weren’t in either. At which point you would run like hell to answer it, out the
back and round the front.
    Astonishing though it now seems, while journalists at the time were inclined to chide Jack for his supposed lack of tactical sophistication, we didn’t regard it as abnormal to be living in
flats with no phones.
    Perhaps the defining narrative of the phone-in-the-hall era concerns an interview with Keith Richards which was due to be conducted by Liam Fay of Hot Press , over the phone, with Liam at
his flat in Rathmines and Keith at his home in the Caribbean.
    Except Keith’s people obviously wouldn’t be giving the private Caribbean phone number of a member of the Rolling Stones to some Paddy rock journalist. So it was arranged that Keith
would be given Liam Fay’s number, which he would call at 7.30 in the evening.
    But Liam didn’t have a phone in the flat.
    The phone was in the hall.
    So it was, that one evening at around 7 o’clock in a large old house in Rathmines, Liam Fay knocked on the door of every tenant in the building and asked them if they could do him a favour
and avoid using the phone at around 7.30, because he was expecting a call from Keith Richards in the Caribbean.
    ——
    So in my mid-twenties, while I seemed to have something resembling a career, even a life, it would not have crossed my mind that this might be the time to do something mad like
get a mortgage and live in an actual house of our own. We had a powerful stereo and a fine record collection and some very good books and we could always do the Lotto, which had just started. So we
didn’t feel the need to be borrowing, say, 50 grand, to get on the ‘property ladder’.
    Most of us who came of age during the 1980s were similarly indifferent to the long term, just happy enough to get through the week with the rent paid. And most of the people I knew just drank
too much to be annoying themselves with property ladders and the like. We were already angry enough, about things like divorce and contraception and abortion, not because we cared much for these
things in themselves, but because they were the issues in the moral civil war being fought in Ireland, which Jack may not have noticed in his zeal to show us how to win football matches, but which
was still festering.
    Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing, to be angry, if you’re working in journalism. It was probably what brought many of us into it in the first place, this idea that there was an
old Ireland to be defeated, as quickly and as completely as we could manage it, to break through the delusions which had sustained that old Ireland, the lies which were just too big, even for
Paddy.
    When people enter ‘the media’ now, they have all sorts of fine ambitions to review restaurants for the Irish Times , or to write a wine column for the Sunday Business
Post , or to present the weather on TV 3. For us, presenting the weather was an impossible dream — at least until Ireland was free. Living in Dun Laoghaire, for
example, it would occur to me, as I watched the boat leaving for Holyhead every day, that roughly ten of the passengers on board must be women heading off to get an abortion. Given that 3,000 women
at the very least were doing this each year, and that, pre-Ryanair, most of them would get the boat, you just did the math.
    But there was no abortion in Ireland, so that was all right. We were not like the others, who permitted the slaughter of the innocents.
    Though of course we were like the others, we just pretended that we weren’t, out-sourcing our abortions for decades, the way we had out-sourced anything else we couldn’t handle, to
England.
    It was these fantastic feats of self-deception that were being challenged at the time. It was nominally about these great moral issues, but it was ultimately about Paddy trying to blast through
some of the bullshit, the terrible, terrible bullshit in which he had been standing